A Physician Becomes the Patient

On Surgery: A Physician Becomes the Patient

What happens when a physician who has spent decades diagnosing, treating, operating, and advising patients suddenly finds himself on the other side of the conversation?

In On Surgery: A Physician Becomes the Patient, Scott Farrell, MD offers a deeply personal look at medicine from two very different perspectives: the physician responsible for making decisions and the patient living with the consequences of those decisions. Drawing on more than 33 years of clinical practice, Farrell explores how medical training, surgical experience, judgment, and time shaped the physician he became, and how his own experiences as a patient changed the way he understood the people he cared for.

The book begins by looking inside the mindset of a physician learning the craft of surgery. Farrell reflects on his path from an early fascination with the human body to medical school, specialty training in obstetrics and gynecology, military service, and decades of clinical practice. He explains that becoming a surgeon involves far more than learning how to use instruments or perform a procedure. Experience, technical ability, judgment, communication, and an understanding of the individual patient all become part of deciding not only how to operate, but whether surgery should be performed at all.